December 2014 Cyber Attacks Statistics

The new year has just begun, and here we are with the last blog post for the 2014 just gone related to the Cyber Attacks statistics derived from the timelines of December (Part I and Part II).

As usual, the US dominate the Country Distribution Chart for all the sectors taken into consideration, well ahead all the other countries.

The Daily Trend of Attacks Chart shows a concentration of activity in the central period of the month (maybe the Christmas atmosphere is particularly inspiring for crooks). After a slow start (or better an initial decrease), the trend climbs up, remaining quite constant for about 10 days.

Cyber Crime rules! Or at least this is what the Motivations Behind Attacks Chart states. Actually this is quite a common situation, however, what is really surprising is the percentage, boomed to a noticeable 72.6% against the 55.8% of the previous month. As a consequence all the other sectors report values, sensibly smaller than the previous month.

Tbe actions of the infamous Lizard Squad have brought DDoS on top of the Attack Techniques Chart (among the known ones). For the first time equally placed with Defacements and DDoS attacks. Once again, targeted attacks rank at number four with 9.8%, substantially in line with November.

For the fourth month in a row, industry ranks unchallenged on top of the Distribution of Targets chart with an unprecedented 47.9%. Governmental targets rank at number two (13.7%), while educational institutions enter the top three with 9.6%.

E-commerce leads the drill-down chart for the industrial targets, whereas Human Rights are on top of the corresponding chart for organizations.

As usual, the sample must be taken very carefully since it refers only to discovered attacks included in my timelines. The sample does not pretend to be exhaustive but only aims to provide an high level overview of the “cyber landscape”, or at least of the ones that gained space in the media (yes, using an abused expression this is just the tip of the Iceberg).

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011, 2012, 2013 and now 2014 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look at the Cyber Attack Statistics.

Of course follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates, and feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).